


AAAAAAARGH!!: Or, Plaidder Rewatches "Milagro" (X-Files, Season 6)

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [17]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Anger, Critique, Episode: s06e18 Milagro, F/M, Meta, Nonfiction, patriarchal bullshit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-26
Updated: 2014-07-26
Packaged: 2018-02-10 11:41:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2023809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>First time around, I found this episode flawed but intriguing.</p><p>This time around I hate it with the white-hot fire of a thousand suns.</p><p>The teen rating is for language. There's some profanity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	AAAAAAARGH!!: Or, Plaidder Rewatches "Milagro" (X-Files, Season 6)

Before watching "Milagro," I posted [the review of it that I wrote up in April of 1999,](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/92827645814/vintage-adders-lair-x-files-milagro) when the episode originally aired. You will see from that review, if you have the patience to glance at it, that at the tender age of 30 I was able to have some fun with it. I recognized it as another Chris Carter meta episode (CC wrote the teleplay; Shiban and Spotnitz wrote the script, so we can't blame any of this on ignorance or inexperience) about writing and the question of how much control writers have over their own process and their own characters. And since I had just discovered fanfiction, and still had hopes for my own original fiction, I was very interested in this Stuff About Writing And Being A Writer, and in the episode as an allegory about fanfiction (if we recognize what Padgett's writing as RPF about Mulder and Scully). Sure, the plot drove me nuts. But it was interesting.

(The plot, incidentally, is basically this: A creepy writer named Padgett becomes fixated on Scully. He moves into the apartment next door to Mulder's so he can stalk her. He starts writing a novel about her. At about the same time, bodies start turning up around DC with their hearts mysteriously ripped out but their bodies otherwise apparently intact. Scully and Mulder investigate. Padgett accosts Scully in a church and she inexplicably becomes interested enough in him to go into his apartment and have coffee with him. Mulder bursts in and arrests Padgett; he's read the MS and it contains detailed descriptions of all the killings. They can't figure out exactly how Padgett's doing it, though; so Mulder lets him out so they can follow him to the next crime scene. While they're surveilling him, Padgett has a confrontation with his novel's male protagonist, The Stranger, who wants to know why he's been ripping out hearts all over town. The Stranger talks him into changing the ending so that instead of having sex with the Stranger, Scully's character winds up dead. Padgett finishes it, then goes down to the basement incinerator to burn the novel. While Mulder is down there waving a gun at him, the Stranger is ripping Scully's heart out upstairs. She shoots at him; it doesn't stop him, but Mulder runs upstairs to help, and Padgett burns the MS. The burning of the MS causes the Stranger to disappear, leaving Scully's heart intact. She hangs onto Mulder, sobbing, while Padgett dies in hte basement, his heart beating in his outstretched hand.)

Re-viewing it again at 45, I have this to add: 

This episode makes me angry.

There are episodes that piss me off because they're technically bad (*cough* "Alpha" *cough*) or because of the irresponsible Othering and monstrification of nonwhite people (*cough* "El Mundo Gira" *cough* "Teiko" *cough* "Trickster" *cough* ah fuck it basically any episode that features people of color *cough* plus that pick-up basketball game at the beginning of "One Son" *cough* seriously what the fuck was that *cough*), or because the characterization is off or the premise is ridiculous. 

This is different.

Because basically this episode is about how male writers relate to their female characters. And what it says about that is so sick and creepy that you really kind of wish you didn't know it. Because with the way things are, most of the female characters that are out there in TV and film for us to identify with and want to be and love are created by male authors...and boys, when it comes to why you really made them and what in your heart of hearts you think they're really for, I DON'T WANT TO KNOW.

All right. So. Let me try and rhyme off the things about this episode that I wish I could unsee.

First of all, Padgett is a really bad writer. Let's forget about plot and characterization and all that for the moment. His prose, itself, is terrible. It's so engorged with its own self-importance that it's just painful to listen to. The fact that he is a crap writer makes everything that happens in this episode a hundred times more insulting than it would otherwise be. Because Padgett is given quite a bit of power over Scully in this episode. Now that would be properly chilling if Padgett were actually a literary genius, and his control over her was something created by that strange magical ability that great writers have to make imaginary things become real. But because Padgett is a self-deluded hack, it is rage-honing, rather than frightening, to see Carter, Shiban and Spotnitz give him the kind of power over Scully that he has in this episode. Because it implies that ANY man who sits down at a typewriter--whether he's good at it or not--has the power and the privilege of making whatever woman he's obsessed with do what he wants her to do.

The episode validates Padgett's delusions of power by making Scully behave in ways that are outrageously out of character. The first instance of this that prompted a howl of rage from me was the scene where he meets her in the church, and she just stands there listening to Padgett go off on a five-minute soliloquy which would send any woman with any sense running for the exit after the first sentence. But that's nowhere near as rage-honing as the voiceover explaining that she was "flattered" by this maniac's interest in her and starting to fantasize about having sex with him. And bad as that is, it's even worse to see her fall for his creepy anonymous love-letter trick and come to his apartment to return the milagro, then go into it and have coffee with him, sitting on his bed even though she mentions that she's really not comfortable with that. And then it also inflames my ventricles to see her defending him to Mulder when she must know damn well that not only these murders but her own behavior are mysteries to which his manipulation is the key.

So either Padgett really does have some kind of magical writerly power that allows him to control Scully, or the team that wrote this episode really  _does_  believe in the bullshit that Padgett slings about how this smart analytical scientist professional thing is a facade she puts on so she can be taken seriously by her male colleagues, and that what she REALLY wants but alas! will never have as long as she persists with this detached analytical persona thing, is to be fucked by a creepy stranger whose every interaction with her sets off WHOLE SCREAMING CHOIRS of alarm bells.

And at that point, one cannot avoid asking oneself the question: Is this what all the regular writers for this show--and so far, they are all men--really want? To be the creepy stranger who gets to fuck Scully? I mean for us, the women watching, this episode is definitely a nightmare. But one starts to get the creeping sense that for the writers, it's a fantasy. 

And then one has to wonder: what does it mean that the only ways Padgett can imagine ending this novel are a) fucking Scully and b) killing her? Oh, and the Stranger loves ending #2. Killing Scully will make this novel "perfect." 

Seriously? Is this what you guys want from the women you write? Either let me fuck you or let me kill you? Because...because...that's kind of evil. And yet, there is actually so much goddamn evidence of these desires in popular culture produced by men that I kind of don't even want to stand her virtually talking you people right now.

But I have to, don't I, because I love her. I love Scully too. But for me, you know, it's different. I want different things for her. I want her to live, and grow, and become awesome, and if the thing with Mulder comes to incorporate sex then so be it as long as it doesn't interfere with any of the rest of that, but if they stay friends, that's OK with me. I don't think Scully is "lonely." Or let me rephrase: I don't think she's SO fucking lonely that she would be easy prey for the first asshole who makes a pass at her, or that she would use that asshole's interest in her to make Mulder jealous. I don't think she's uncomfortable with who she is or that her life as a professional is empty because it prevents her from being goopy and dewy-eyed around her colleagues. I think respect is kind of rewarding in and of itself, and far more precious to many of us than the kind of sexual interest she gets from Padgett. 

You made this character that I love...and THIS is what you do with her. This. You fuckers.

And you know what the rage-honingest part of it is?

I've been talking about how Scully would never give this guy the time of day if she weren't being mind-controlled. But in fact, I know, from my own experience and that of others close to me, that in fact women who are just as smart and self-driven as she is DO put up with creepy shit from men that makes them uncomfortable because they're afraid to do anything confrontational, and DO get themselves into obviously inadvisable relationships because they feel some kind of pressure to have A Man. The kind of control Padgett exerts over her is exerted over ALL women in this culture, all the time; and it has far more power over us than it should. Just as the kind of craptastic woman-slicing serial killer novel that Padgett's writing--the novel the episode's writers think is so good that it actually endowed its protagonist with life--exerts far more power than it should over our own sense of self and society, far more power than (on the strength of its actual literary merit) it deserves.

In my own original fiction, I am realizing, there are actually a number of moments at which a female character winds up in conversation with the woman who created her. And what I notice, going back over these scenes in my mind, is that the women who create these other women do not treat them the way Padgett treats Scully, or the way Carter/Shiban/Spotnitz treats her in their writing of the episode. What they want for their female characters is happiness, success, true love if it's out there for them, but above all growth and flourishing and going forth into the world to be their bad selves. Even in my fanfic I have a thing for getting female characters who are isolated in the canon universe into contact with each other so they can help each other out. Obviously I want something different from my characters than Padgett wants, or than Chris Carter at this moment appears to want. Maybe this is why so many male gatekeepers think so many women writers are Doing It Wrong.

Anyway. Christ almighty. Thank God THAT'S over. And yet I have a feeling I will never quite get the taste of that episode out of my mouth. 


End file.
